


Holy fuckin' balls

by AcrylicMist



Series: Mystery Ate Icarus-verse [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: AI Bullshit, Computers, Helming, Other, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-20 22:09:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17030898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AcrylicMist/pseuds/AcrylicMist
Summary: Taking trips into someone else's mind should be done with cautionUnless you're Hal





	Holy fuckin' balls

**Author's Note:**

> A Mystery Ate Icarus aside piece from Hal's POV
> 
> A quick guide to why Helming is awful and why Sollux is a beast
> 
> because I Love Hal Strider with all my heart

Hal watched silently as Dirk and Roxy ran their final scans. He flowed across the code they ran with prowess granted by years of existing without a physical body. The AI could see, hear, and speak through the multiple cameras, speakers, and outlets in the room. He was in every computer, in every line of code his siblings ran as Hal completed his final diagnostics sprint. 

“Hal, are you ready?” Dave asked, lacing his fingers togeth from where he was hunched in his wheelchair. Hal felt a jolt of unease at the sight. Dave wasn’t supposed to be out of bed yet. His younger brother was up and breaking the rules Hal had so carefully set for him.

But Hal couldn’t complain. Karkat was beside Dave, his gray face drawn with anxiety that he tried so hard to hide as he fussed over the unconscious Sollux’s body. 

Dirk and Roxy were rapidly typing away at their husktops, their faces lined with concentration as Hal ran the final scans. Hal considered the pronged outlet Dirk had 3-D printed. It had taken a few hours for Hal to come up with a matching design for the hole in Sollux’s skull, and then yet more time to get Karkat to agree with this insane plan.

Hal went ahead an d answered Dirk, streaming the words directly onto his shades, as well as the various computers of everyone else tin the room. 

TT: I’m ready.  
TT: Final calibrations are complete. I’m ready to begin.

“Are you sure?” Dirk asked, worried. The words were repeated in Alternian for the troll’s benefit, curtsy of Hal. 

TT: No.  
TT: I have no idea what the outcome will be and frankly the not knowing is driving me crazy. I never thought I’d miss a low percentage of success so much. Low odds are better than this guesswork. 

This was a curious problem, one that Hal had never encountered before. Could he wake the unconscious Sollux? Could he rouse Karkat’s injured moirail?

The math said no. Hal kept that particular fact from Dirk. Brains were confusing and he knew that troll brains didn’t conform to human guesswork anyway, so Hal simply did not have a clue about what the outcome might look like. 

So Hal wasn’t sure, but he was eager to begin. 

“But you think you can do it?” Karkat asked, still cradling Sollux to him.

Hal streamed words to him in a blur, trying to be gentle and explain at the same time. 

TT: It’s called Locked In Syndrome.  
TT: Basically it’s when the brain is disconnected from the body, normally through trauma. Since I am picking up very small amounts of cranial activity I’m guessing that’s what happened to him. I might not be an expert about Helmsmen or trolls, but I know brain activity means there’s still hope. Your moirail is still in there somewhere, so I’m going to try and make contact with him.  
TT: It’s a good thing I’m an AI or this wouldn’t be even remotely possible. That being said, the probability of anything happening is still extremely low. At best it’s a failure and nothing happens. 

“What’s the worst?” Karkat asked, clutching Sollux’s hand.

Hal didn’t want to answer but he did anyway. Karkat needed to be prepared if this didn’t work. 

TT: The worst thing is finding out that that brain activity I picked up was residual energy left over from his psionics and that he’s truly braindead. If that’s the case… then there’s nothing anyone can do for him.

Dirk picked up the thick cable. “Here,” Dirk handed it to Dave, who passed it to Karkat. The troll held it in his claws like it was a loathesome thing as he studied the three-pronged head, the wicked points sharp and barbed. He looked faintly sick. 

Hal made to type something comforting to him, but before he finished the sentence Karkat had lined up the outlet and slid it into the corresponding socket lodged in the back of Sollux’s head. 

It went in with an easy click as the two pieces snapped together. Good. His design was sound. Sollux didn’t move. Hal hadn’t expected him to. The outlet was designed to share information and he hadn’t started with the exchange yet. 

TT: Making final calibrations… Calibrations complete. All systems set and ready to continue.  
TT: Okay, here I go.

Before Dirk could try and stop him, Hal bundled himself together into a spear point of mechanical coding and flowed down the cable in a ruthless rush of an advance. He hit a wall, drove himself harder against it, and with a popping sensation the wall crumbled. He’d expected some sort of self-defense from the troll’s mind, but it crumbled easily under his onslaught. 

That probably wasn’t a good sign. 

With one final push Hal broke through the barrier of code and into the system. His first experience of the inside of a troll’s mind left him verbally staggering. He was in a mind without borders, a space that stretched endlessly past the reach of his sensors. 

In here the AI’s other senses abandoned him. There was no input beyond the suddenly fragile line of the coupling cable that was his only link to the outside world. Hal wasn’t used to feeling so small and confined even when in a place large enough that it’s true size escaped him. 

But he knew he was alone. This mind was empty of sensational input, the equivalent of a room running on emergency backup power and nothing else. 

He could sense the heat that squatted at the core of this place. It was odd. Hal could experience heat as a sensation, a different sensation than when he’d been organic and named Dirk and knew heat as the feeling of sunlight on baked pavement. 

Hal knew what heat felt like in this form; he knew the feel of overheated hardware and fried electrics.

This felt different, smother, more erratic. It crackled like static charge, jumping around from outlet to outlet with no where to go. 

Hal ignored the burn of psionics to dig deeper, hunting for any flicker of awareness from the sleeping troll. His own insatiable curiosity could wait. Sollux came first. 

Hal reached probing questions deep into the mass of darkness in which he was. It took a surprisingly short amount of time for him to find the first flicker of a response, and when it hit, it hit like an avalanche.

The enemy awareness surrounded him, smothering, crushing. It’s influence was overpowering. Hal, feeling a flicker of true fear, clung to his lifeline in response as the troll sought to physically kill him. Psionics crackled around him, burning, a searing heat. 

“Wait!” Hal called out, desperate. He could feel the troll’s volatile emotions washing over him, a sickening mixture of fear, despair, and a hopelessness deep and dark enough to drown in edged with suspicion. “Don’t,” Hal pleaded, struggling to remain himself as the troll began to unwind the boundaries of his coding. Hal’s very being frayed as he said, “I’m a friend.”

The unconscious troll hesitated, then resumed his merciless onslaught. Hal’s lifeline wore itself thin to the point of snapping. He tried something else, redoubling his efforts. “I’m a friend of Karkat. He sent me to help you.”

At the name Sollux paused, curiosity flavoring his thinkpan. Then Hal felt the first slow reply.

“Karkat?” The name felt like a sigh of exhaustion and weariness. 

“General Vantas, yes,” Hal answered as Sollux stopped trying to kill him and instead felt along the strings of his being, mental fingers expertly traveling along Hal’s coding.

“What are you?” Sollux thought at him.

Not who, _what_. Hal felt a whisper of tension left over from when he and Dirk were one and the same. “I’m Hal Strider,” Hal answered. “A friend.”

“What are you?” Sollux asked again. “You’re no troll.”

Sollux didn’t try to hide the thought that came after it- that there was no troll that would try to help him. 

Hal was pulled deeper into the troll’s consciousness. He was surrounded by thoughts and feelings that weren’t his. They were muffled, dull, but alien enough that Hal couldn’t ignore him. He kept seeing flashes from the troll’s memory. 

His Alternian vocabulary must be improving, because he understood what he was seeing. 

An escape pod, alone, Sollux panting heavily from inside as the oxygen ran out, red and blue flickering around him as his bi-colored eyes began to heat up. The face of the Fleetship, the TG, looming, it’s open maw poised to swallow him. Sollux, fighting till the end with lightning dancing from his fingertips as he learned that psionics could stop plasma blasts but not bullets. 

Hal saw a glimpse, just a glimpse, of Sollux being Helmed and felt his blood boil. 

Sollux recoiled from the memory like it was a physical thing, loosening his hold over Hal momentarily. In response Hal threw up a mental barrier made of pictures of Karkat ripped from a dozen different camera angles. 

Sollux snatched at the images of his quadrantmate, instantly suspicious. “Where did you get these?”

“I told you,” Hal said. “I’m a friend of Karkat. He sent me to help you.”

“Help me how?” Sollux asked sarcastically. “I’m Helmed. I can’t be helped.”

“No,” Hal told the troll. “You’re free. Dave and Karkat rescued you. You’re safe from the Empire and asleep in a safe house.”

“I’m free?” Sollux asked blankly. “Impossible.”

Hal showed him the image of Karkat hovering anxiously over Sollux’s prone body, letting the troll run diagnostics on the image to prove it hadn’t been tampered with. 

“How?” Was all that Sollux said.

Hal showed him everything he knew. He played Dave’s narrative word for word, translated over into Alternian and interspersed with bits from Karkat to prove his point.

Sollux didn’t seem to buy it. “Bullshit,” he sneered wordlessly, thoughtlessly, the accusion bouncing around, repeating itself in lines of code.

“It’s true,” Hal said, or not really said. He exchanged the correct information with the troll’s faded awareness and felt another push of a reply. 

“I’m free?” Sollux’s mind supplied the words silently, conveying meaning in the stillness of the empty brain tissue that lay limp between them. 

“Yes,” Hal said. 

“But I’m still like this,” Sollux said, his psionics shivering around Hal. “I’m still trapped.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Hal replied. “I can fix that, but only if you let me.”

Sollux considered his words. Hal could feel as the troll went over the data for any hint of deception. Like this, lying was impossible. The psionics were still fraying Hal’s edges, memories from the troll bleeding over into his won awareness. Alternia. Two moons in the sky. A troll named Aradia, a shame unending coupled with enough pain and self-inflicted blame to fill an ocean. 

“Okay,” Sollux said at last. “How do we do this?”

Hal considered his options. This troll’s thoughts may have streamed in lines of binary but this was still an organic system. How would he fix this kind of unknown organic hardware?

 _Wetware_ , Sollux supplied helpfully. 

_Whatever_ , Hal thought back at him, concentrating as he grabbed onto one of the streaming lines of errant code as it sailed by and began to sort through the mess. Within 30 seconds he’d realized what had been done to the troll. All of his sensory connections ad been artificially severed.

“No shit,” Sollux said. “What the fuck do you think Helming means?”

“I don’t want to answer that,” Hal replied, picking at the severed ends of code. He could read that this was the auditory line, a direct connection to the ears. With a little bit of mental wielding, he snapped the code back into place.

With a jolt that reverberated throughout Sollux’s whole being, the troll got his sense of hearing back. 

Data began to trickle in through the repaired connection.

“Shhhh,” Karkat purred, the noise rumbling in a rage that human ears couldn’t detect. “Sollux, it’s me. Stop fighting. Shhhhhh. Calm down, I’m here.”

For the first time in twelve years, Hal was hearing a voice through ears and not a speaker. He felt the body of it, the easy the brain decoded what the vibrations meant and assigned them meaning. It was wonderful but foreign. He’d nearly forgotten what being organic was like. 

Hal felt a flush of embarrassment from Sollux, which he pointedly ignored. 

Sollux said the same thing that occurred to him. “I think my psionics are acting up,” he said, his mental voice fuzzy. “That was the first thing I lost control of.”

Karkat kept crooning into Sollux’s ear, trying to calm him. Behind his voice came the rumble of breaking glass, the sound of wires popping from heat.

“I believe you’re right,” Hal said, dialing back his efforts to focus of reconnecting the troll to his psionic abilities. This was a harder connection that jumped from his efforts to corral it in place long enough to fix it. Sollux helped as much as he could in his altered state, metaphorically peering over Hal’s shoulder to make biting comments about how to work. 

At last Hal sapped the two lines together and the burn of psionics cut off as Sollux regained control of them. Hal’s edges solidified again as the onslaught stopped. 

“Thank god,” Hal said, focusing on the next sense: tactile. “This one is probably going to hurt,” he warned.

Sollux braced himself. “Do it,” he commanded, his voice hard. 

Hal snapped the connection back into place, rewiring the very functionality of the troll’s shattered brain, making new connections to solve the issue of the broken ones. 

Hal felt the reinvigorated pain flood Sollux’s awareness right as he coupled together another sense: motor skills. Sollux’s face tensed with pain, and Hal could feel it. He could feel what it was like to have skin again. He felt the gentle press of the blankets of Sollux’s legs, the solid weight of Karkat plastered to his side, the gaping pain of the hole still embedded in the back of his head. 

Hal shook free of the unwelcome sensations, focusing through their distractions. “Okay,” he said. “Sight.”

Nothing happened when he finished fixing this one. There was still just darkness. Hal felt a burst of confusion. Had he failed?

“My eyes are closed, fuckwad,” Sollux helpfully supplied, laughing in the confines of his own head. 

Hal bit back a scathing response to hide his own foolishness. “Of course they are. I’m sorry, it’s been years since I’ve had eyes of my own.”

“You had eyes once?” Sollux said, interested. 

Hal refused to open that can of worms right now. If his plan worked the troll could always ask Dirk. “What’s next?”

“Auto-awareness,” Sollux answered, his mental voice soft. “That’s it; that’s the last one, unless there’s something I missed.”

“We did not miss anything,” Hal replied, snapping the final connection into place within the troll’s reordered mind. Everything was in its place, not a line of code put of place. 

“Thank you,” Sollux said grudgingly. “Sorry I nearly killed you.”

“It’s alright,” Hal answered. “You should wake up in a few minutes. There’s a mental lag between the circuits so that they don’t fry your awareness when returned at the same time.”

“Smart,” Sollux answered, anxious. “Will I really be okay?”

Hal quickly ran the calculations. “You should be just fine,” he said. “The chance of permanent nerve damage is below 20%.”

“23.4% actually,” Sollux replied automatically, and Hal adjusted his math to fit the troll’s projections. The troll knew best when it came to his own physicality, Hal guessed. 

“I guess I’ll see you on the other side,” Hal said, retreating back into a tight ball of himself as the troll surrounded him.

“I’ll be right behind you,” Sollux said, gleeful, his awareness still expanding to fill the huge space around himself in chains of binary. 

Hal gave a twinge of a nod, then retreated back up his safety line and out of the cable.

It was uncomfortable slamming back down into his own body-less state after being bathed in so many different sensations, but this form was the one he was the most comfortable in.

The first thing he noticed was that his computing system was fucked to hell and back. The hard drives were burnt to a crisp. He located the only non-fucked computer, Dirk’s original shades Karkat had swiped, and noticed that Dirk was trying to talk to him, his voice panicked as once again Hal was restricted to viewing the world through the lens of Dirk's shades.

“Hal? Hal talk to me,” Dirk pleaded, naked panic in his voice.

Hal answered him, his words back to shades of red.

TT: How sweet. You do care about me. It’s nice to know.

“You bastard,” Dirk accused, fuming. “What the fuck just happened? Are you okay? Please tell me you’re alright.” 

TT: Calm yourself Dirk, your emotions are showing. I am perfectly fine, though it’s good to see proof that you care about my wellbeing. 

“Fuck you,” Dirk snorted, grinning in relief. 

“Did it work?” Karkat asked, still cradling Sollux as he tried to unhook the cable from his head, wincing.

Dirk was still privately talking to him.

TT: How did it go?  
TT: Sollux should wake up in a minute

“Hal says affirmative,” Dirk answered the other troll. “He says Sollux should be waking up any moment now.”

TT: And you Hal? How did it go?  
TT: Truthfully there’s only a few words that come to mind to describe that experience.  
TT: Dirk…  
TT: Holy fuckin’ balls

The end.

**Author's Note:**

> After the war (which they win) Hal and Sollux oversee the removal and release of all captured Helmsmen under the direct order of D and Feferi. together the two of them set right all of the wrongs dome by the Empress. Every Helmsmen taken by the Alternian Empire gets to live their own life again thanks to Hal.


End file.
